Augmented Reality
- Image via Wikipedia
The other day I sat down with my seven year old daughter to show her a new iPhone app that I had installed. Not that this was a first – even my three year old has been quite competent with the iPhone since she was just turned two – a testament to Apple’s interface design! What made this occasion different was my insistence that she remembered where she was on this day – the first time she played with a true augmented reality application.
Such applications are really only possible since the advent of the iPhone 3GS which has a compass, GPS and accelerometers which give it a fairly accurate idea of its location in three dimensions.
For some time web applications such as Google Maps have been overlaying data onto the maps and we have become quite used to finding information about surrounding businesses in such a way. The iPhone 3GS allows developers to go one step further – taking away the 2D view of the map and replacing it with a real-time view of the world using the camera and screen as a viewport. The application I was playing with is called NearestWiki. You start the application and move the 3GS to look at the world around you – information badges appear in space which draw information from Wikipedia. I was surprised how many entries there were near my house – I should imagine that when visiting a city it would be fascinating!
Probably the most exciting of such applications at the moment is called the Bionic Eye – which sadly does not have Australian data at the moment. This shows shopping and public transport venues nearby. When one is selected simply point the iPhone camera towards the pavement and arrows appear giving directions.
I believe that fairly quickly such technology will find its way into, perhaps, an attachment for glasses and will become ubiquitous. Whilst the benefits of such data overlays are of interest in daily life – in medicine they are truly astounding!
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- Bionic Eye app creates augmented reality on your iPhone 3GS (mobilecrunch.com)
- Bionic Eye: Augmented Reality App for the iPhone (thenextweb.com)
- BIONIC EYE: Augmented Reality on the iPhone (mashable.com)
